


Seven Thousand and One

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Series: Shrapnel [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Childhood Romance, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Minor Canonical Character(s), implied past sexual violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 18:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4110214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s me,” she says, as if it weren’t obvious, as if the back of her head didn’t still fit perfectly in Valkyrie’s palm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Thousand and One

Under the influence  
I’ll take the consequence  
Well, if it’s poisonous  
Let it take my last breath  
– Elle King  


 

**** 

 

She is screaming into the wind, playing the role she knows well. The script unfolds as it always does, the giant rig rumbling to a stop, until a woman drops from the cab and starts shouting back.

“I am one of the Vuvalini, of the Many Mothers!”

They have lost so many. They have become so few.

“My initiate mother was Katie Concannon.”

It cannot be. Is it even possible?

“I am the daughter of Mary Jobassa.”

From her perch high in the honey trap, Valkyrie feels her heart explode with the uncontainable joy of a transcendent sun.

 

****

 

She has machinery where she once had flesh, but she still stands with her feet planted and her hands akimbo – strong, but not threatening. Her hair is shorn close to her scalp, but it’s still ash blond and feather-soft.

“It’s me,” she says, as if it weren’t obvious, as if the back of her head didn’t still fit perfectly in Valkyrie’s palm.

Her body is the same, whip-thin and deceptively sturdy, a rangy column of muscle and strength and iron-clad resolve. She feels at once solid and not nearly big enough for the circle of Val’s arms, and her grip is the same as it ever was, firm without being possessive. She’s tendon and bone, she’s the sharp whiff of sulfur after the shot, she’s the pull of gravity itself. She’s layers of grease and diesel fumes, but under that her sweat is heady with memories of green and youth and the dizzying sense of jumping from cliffs into deep water. She is a time machine in the shape of a woman, and Val is at once four and fourteen and forty, a maelstrom of knobby knees and freckled skin and thundering hearts.

If Valkyrie dies at this moment, she will die happy. Her chest is so full it’s spilling from her eyes, hot and bright and sweet.

“There’s something in the eyes,” says Amy, pulling back her hood. “Perhaps she is Jobassa’s child.”

Val holds the prodigal’s shoulders; she is herself a wild, windblown mess of tears and completely, gorgeously overwhelmed. “This is our Furiosa,” she breathes, the years shearing away and shifting like dunes in the storm.

When she can speak, she stands back, makes herself ask. “How long has it been?”

“Seven thousand days,” says Furiosa. “Plus the ones I don’t remember.”

It is an unassailable monolith of time, the surface opaque and unbreakable. Every moment of Furiosa’s absence is etched into her skin, the agony of loss wrought through her warp and weft. Val can read it in her eyes, the way the color is the sorrowful blue of an oncoming storm, inevitable and inescapable and utterly at the mercy of the wind.

“Furiosa,” says Mari quietly. “Where is your mother?”

“She died, on the third day,” says Furiosa, and oh, those six words are heavier than all the books in all the languages that humankind has ever written. They are an indictment and an admission, an explanation and a reckoning, and they cost more than anyone could ever account. Jobassa’s daughter no longer bends beneath the weight of them; they have been folded and beaten into her soul like the forging of steel, the syllables preceding her like the cadence of her own footsteps. Valkyrie watches her make the gesture of remembrance, sees the moment that muscle knows better than brain, and the wonder on Furiosa’s face as if she’d forgotten others could bear the weight of sorrow. 

“From where did you come?” asks Tamar. 

“The west. Citadel. Beyond the mountains.” She nods toward the horizon, toward the hulking metal beast that carried her so far. 

All at once, the doors open, and four white-wrapped young women get out, followed by two men. Immediately, Lina is stepping forward, snapping her rifle to her shoulder. “The men. Who are they?”

Furiosa reaches out to stop her, the thick fingers of her machine hand gently pushing the barrel away. “They’re reliable. They helped us get here.”

The two groups converge, each woman greeting the others in her own way: Eleanor embracing, the Keeper prodding, Lina scowling until she can’t contain her smile. 

“I can’t wait for them to see it,” says Furiosa, her lips twitching shyly, like she’s privy to a grand, beautiful surprise.

“See?” The Keeper blinks in concern. “See what?”

“ _Home_ ,” says Furiosa, indulgently, as if the Keeper is playing along with concealing the surprise. “The Green Place.”

The women are silent, and Valkyrie holds her breath. 

“But if you came from the west,” Tamar says quietly, speaking the truth no one wants to share, “...you passed it.”

Confusion skirts the edges of Furiosa’s face. 

“The crows,” breathes the squinting girl with the bone-white hair. “The creepy place with all the crows.”

As Vuvalini voices tremble with bone-deep regret, reality shatters as certainly as if the world-killing bombs were raining directly overhead. Valkyrie feels the shockwave in her own chest, a white-hot storm scouring everything green and good and wet down to dead and barren rock. She’s frozen in place, a statue in boiling glass as the prodigal staggers away, a howl like the apocalyptic winds torn from Furiosa’s throat.

 

****

 

When Furiosa comes back into the fold, she is cracked dry like worn leather, her sorrow buried like water beneath the sand. Valkyrie’s instinct is to hold her, to wrap her in warm blankets and warmer skin, to chase away the deadness that lurks behind her eyes, but there's a gulf between them that she feels unable to cross. 

The Green Place is gone, taken by the crows and the ones who eat them, the ones who have donned black feathers and gone sour like the land itself. The Green Place is tainted, but the world is not dead; four golden women stand among them, straight and perfect and swathed in white like cooling mist. For the first time in many thousands of days, there are men among them, reliable men. They are stray dogs, the both of them: the one like a corpse trots after the redheaded woman with the slavish devotion of a starving rescue; the other stays on the edge of camp, a wary mongrel, communicating in grunts and tolerating only Furiosa to come near.

They eat together from a communal pot over a smokeless fire, a simple meal of bilby and peppercress and the last stringy flesh of yesterday’s goanna. 

“Your arm,” says Tamar gently. “How did you come to wear such a device?”

Furiosa has the prosthetic in her lap, oiling the joints with an ease born of long practice. “I made it myself,” she says, which isn’t an explanation but is somehow more eloquent than any detailed account. The skin of her stump is tucked into itself like folded fabric, like a sleeve that’s just waiting for the arm to fill it. She’s quiet as she works, content to listen to the newcomers talk with the mothers, rarely interjecting. It’s as if Furiosa herself is truncated, abbreviated, as if everything she is has been heavily edited by time. She is a weatherworn stone, ground down to her barest core. 

_I remember when you were a monsoon,_ Valkyrie thinks, watching the flames dance on her sister’s downcast eyelashes. _Now you feel more like the desert._

She doesn’t have to ask how it happened. She can hear it in the silence, like the rustle of a feathery black hood. 

 

****

 

They were young together once, dark hair and honey-pale flowing together like swaying grass below the water’s surface. They were as close as the pause between inhale and exhale, as entangled as blood vessels around a human heart. They were an unbroken expanse of freckled skin, a single entity made from two coltish bodies. They were going to go out into the waste and find the orphans, and bring them back to raise as siblings in the circle of their mothers’ arms. Only the birth and death of the universe could be a measure of their time together. 

That infinite scale, abruptly compressed into seven thousand days, thinks Valkyrie, watching her lost sister from across the fire. The shadows play across Furiosa’s face, the darkness shifting and changing like the passage of grief. They are both changed, their skin folded and worn like the bottom of a river. They are not the girls they once were, racing through the darkness on their mothers’ motorcycles, whooping and howling like the sunset-colored dogs that once haunted the edge of the oasis. 

Furiosa has clung to the memory of the Green Place with all the strength of her remaining arm, and Valkyrie holds the hands of her mothers, knowing that for the rest of her life, her only taste of sweet water will be in her heart. Valkyrie looks back because she honors where she’s from; Furiosa looks forward because that is the only place left for her to go. 

****

 

Plans are made and agreements are reached. Offers are extended. “Will he come, your man?” Valkyrie asks, but she knows the answer even before Furiosa shakes her head. He is clanless and lost, the voices of the dead louder in his skull than the voices of the living.

“He isn’t mine,” Furiosa says. “He isn’t anyone’s.” There’s something raw in her words, an undercurrent of sorrow so unfathomable and dark that Valkyrie wants to wrap herself around Jobassa’s daughter, wants to fold herself into the deepest parts of Furiosa and whisper _You are here, you belong with us, you are ours._

Instead, she makes herself hook her elbow through Furiosa’s and whispers, “Come, watch the stars with me.”

They climb the dunes and cross to the other side, away from the voices floating between the motorcycles. The night air is weightless and cool, the moonlit salt pan gleaming like half-remembered fish scales. 

Furiosa pulls her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. She walks like there are heavy stones in her boots, and when Valkyrie sits and pats the sand beside her, she seems to collapse, as if all that she is has been drained away. She is just beyond Val’s reach, hunched into herself, a fortress of bone and grief. 

“Furiosa.” The word is soft, like a prayer. 

Her lost sister turns her head. She is barreling full speed on two threadbare tires, worn beyond any hope of safety but unable to find her brakes. 

Valkyrie scoots closer, closing the gap between them. For a moment, Furiosa hesitates, then opens the blanket and tucks her inside. Val puts her head on her lost sister's shoulder, breathing in the lingering musk of diesel and sweat. 

Under the blanket, she runs her hand over Furiosa’s stump, the tangled knot of flesh just below her elbow. “Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.” Furiosa looks up at the sky, her eyes tracing the path of a satellite across the black. “Sometimes it even feels like I have fingers again. It feels like they’re burning.”

Val reaches down and folds her hand around empty air, as if she’s covering the phantom limb with her own. “What does it feel like right now?”

“Nothing.” Furiosa’s eyes are colorless and empty. “There’s nothing.” 

Valkyrie is no longer certain they’re still talking about her hand. “You came back,” she says, desperation and anger warring in her chest. “You came all this way.”

“It’s gone,” says Furiosa. Her voice is hard and thin, the jarring resonance of a wire pulled to breaking. “We drove right through it, and I didn’t even recognize.”

“It’s not gone.” Val raises her hand, and pulls down a fist to lightly bump against Furiosa’s heart. “It’s here. You’re here.”

“What does that even mean?” It comes out plaintive and raw. 

“It means you’re right where you’re supposed to be.” She wraps herself around Furiosa, palming the back of her lost sister’s scalp, pressing circles with the pads of her fingers against her skull and down the back of her neck. Gradually, Furiosa relaxes, tension bleeding out until she’s draped like a damp cloth. 

“I missed you every day,” she mumbles, face pressed into Valkyrie’s neck. 

Valkyrie presses her cheek to her forehead, aching with the sense that she could crawl into Furiosa’s skin and still feel too far away. Her fingertips ghost down Furiosa’s shoulder, dipping below her collar, and her lost sister flinches, a movement like the hitch of an overwound spring. “Val-”

“How long,” Valkyrie murmurs, “has it been since someone touched you?”

Furiosa doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t have to; her eyes are two glowing stones in the night, her involuntary shudder explicit. It has been far less than seven thousand days, and the hands that haven’t been Valkyrie’s haven’t been kind. 

“Oh, my heart,” Val whispers. “What have they done to you?” 

Once upon a time, they shared a single skin, tangled together in water and grass and sky, days and weeks with the sharp sweetness of each other lingering in their mouths. Valkyrie kissed her until their lips were raw and chapped, searching out the secret places that made her sigh and moan and writhe. 

There have been others since, women she’s known along the way, but no one who could spread her with the familiarity of her own fingers, no one whose heartbeat echoed in Valkyrie’s own chest, whose breath filled Valkyrie’s own lungs. She’s swallowed back her emptiness and squared her shoulders, walking away from the summer haze of her youth like she walked away from the poisoned water of her home. 

Furiosa’s eyes are red and flooding, and she’s holding herself like a hand pressed against a gunshot wound.

Gently, Valkyrie brings their foreheads together, offering a steady weight as her lost sister spins her tires and falters in the sand. 

 

****

 

In the morning, they take off into the blazing white salt, the Vuvalini and their new sisters. Furiosa slices through the wind at the front of the pack, leading them, Valkyrie at her right hand as was always supposed to be

They are not two miles into the salt when the motorcycle ridden by the silent and tense man cuts them off, and everyone rolls to a stop. 

Val’s heart clenches tight in her chest to see that someone else, a man, knows Furiosa better than Valkyrie ever will, that someone who doesn’t talk still somehow knows the right words to turn her so immediately. Her hands spasm on the handlebars, and Tamar leans over to rest her head on Valkyrie’s shoulder in sympathy. When Furiosa grabs his hand, there is no reluctance, no doubt.

They do not go into the salt. Instead, they go east, Valkyrie on her bike with Tamar riding pillion, because she cannot bear to see the woman she loves driving the rig of the ones who stole her so many years ago. 

Valkyrie doesn’t know about Valhalla. She has never been told that Immortan Joe will conduct her soul to the halls of warriors past, or that a good death is one that ends with rending metal and a fireball’s bloom. All she knows is that whatever Furiosa is searching for is in the east, that whatever can fill the hole left by the Green Place will only be found by crossing back through the mountains. 

She is a wild, windblown goddess, and when they run her down, her heart is full of purpose and her head is high.

**Author's Note:**

> The Length and Breadth of Fury Road still takes precedence, but this was a oneshot that took me by surprise.


End file.
